[en] The ZED-2 (Zero Energy Deuterium) reactor is an experimental low-power critical facility located at the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada. The facility is used to perform physics experiments in support of the CANDU and Advanced CANDU Reactor (ACR) programs. The reactor core is a large cylindrical vessel in which reactor fuel rods are positioned vertically. A heavy water moderator is pumped into the vessel to make the reactor critical. The ZED-2 design is very versatile: it can accommodate mixed fuel types in a variable number of fuel rods each with or without CANDU-type or ACR-type channels; channel coolants can be light or heavy water, or air, and can vary from channel to channel; lattices can be square or hexagonal with continuously variable lattice pitch; and some CANDU-type channels can be heated. Many of the experiments performed involve uniform cores containing the same type of fuel and channel in each fuelled location. However, at times a smaller number of fuel rods and channels are placed in the centre of a larger region of reference fuel to form a critical core assembly. These are called substitution experiments. The purpose of this paper is to describe why substitution experiments are performed, detail how they have historically been conducted and analyzed to extract the desired data from the test fuel, and finally how they are performed and analyzed today using specialized software.